I’m glad I live in the age of technology (is that what we call it?). Sure, it can be distracting. We fall off cliffs while catching Pokemon. We drop our phones in the toilet. We can’t sit through a 22 minute tv show without looking something up on Wikipedia. (Excluding the Pokemon example, by “we” I actually mean “I”).

But we’re also communicating, sharing, connecting, teaching, and learning! Without the ease of the internet, I wouldn’t have known where to turn for tips on pattern design. Who knows if the local library would have had books about it? Thanks to Amazon, I ordered a book and it got here the next day. Thanks to the generous teachings of bloggers and YouTubers, I watched videos on how to better use tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. And thanks to social media, I felt encouraged to keep making stuff after people reacted positively to my work.

“As you read this, fashion and textile design pioneers, newly freed by digital technology from the restrictions imposed by mass production–namely, limitations on the number of colors and the requisite use of pattern–are completely changing the notion of what a fabric print is.”

Fabric design, Kight, says, is entering the “territory of fine art.” Which means we all get to me more creative — and DRESS more creatively, too!

Anyway, here’s a pattern I made so that I could practice some new tricks that I picked up. These houses were definitely inspired by the wonderful colonial architecture that is so common here in Massachusetts. And because I tend to be excessive and am a nut about color, I’m sharing several versions of it with you:

Which color do you like the best? I think the gray one would make a great bow tie. And the dark purple one…it just makes me happy.

Now, I’ve only just started to dip my toes into this bottomless ocean that is pattern design. I have a lot of room to grow (to put it gently). Right now I’m just letting myself play — figuring out how repeats work, testing out my different tools/mediums, and getting familiar with the parameters of design. Learning, learning, learning. Which, of course, takes time…

…but all the while (day and night) I can’t stop brainstorming ideas! Patterns, my friends, are taking over.

My imagination is racing, turning everything I see into motifs I could use for future patterns. Designers, I’ve learned, call this “building your design library”. Everything is a novelty print waiting to be made, and I can’t stop myself from “pattern-izing” things, from the contents of my refrigerator to the the birds squawking outside. It’s a fun time (if only I could turn it off at night).

(building my design library)

Then, to add fuel to the fire, there is this lovely detail: I’m already surrounded by surface pattern designs! Honestly, have you ever noticed how much art is in your life? Designers have decorated everything — their patterns lurk in every corner, waiting to inspire you.

Needless to say, I’m having a good time exploring this new creative realm, and I’m excited about what I’m learning. I do hope, though, that my body will adjust to this surge in adrenaline and figure out how to sleep at night. (Yeah, if you could get on that, Body, that would be great. Thanks.)

To conclude, here are some of my latest creations:

“Ants and Melons”

And my 4th of July patterns (in case you missed them on Instagram last weekend):

I recently discovered the world of “surface pattern design”. Now, I’ve always enjoyed me some wallpaper, fabric, wrapping paper, and other pattern-printed things, but it never really dawned on me that there was an actual term/career field pertaining to it. What can I say? — we’re all a bit slow at times.

What a wonderful discovery! Now that I know there is an actual OUTLET for my itchy urge to draw all the “little things”, I find that the sky is the limit.

Fabric…specialty paper…these things are PRIME channels for all the rinky-dink doodles I enjoy making so much. What’s that, world? There’s a REASON for me to create repetitious designs of ketchup bottles?! You’re telling me that someone might actually want some fabric covered in umbrellas and pool buoys?! THAT’S INCREDIBLE! OH life, you never cease to keep me engaged.

Not only is this a gratifying outlet for my difficult-to-ignore compulsion to draw all the things, but it’s also a great way to pass the time after I’ve reached my daily limit of working on what I consider (for better or worse) to be the “serious” stuff (i.e. my acrylic and watercolor paintings). Alas, as much as I WISH I could paint for 8 hours straight on a highly detailed watercolor painting of cracked and peeling house-paint (yes, you heard me), realistically, that never seems to happen. After a certain amount of time, my eyeballs glaze over, my observational keenness dims, and I cease responding intelligently to the details of what I’m looking at. My hand cramps up, and my brushstrokes get sloppy. To keep working at that point would just leave me burnt out for tomorrow. And it would probably undo the progress I made up until then. So I make it a point to stop before I’ve exhausted myself. This ensures that I’m excited and ready to begin again the next day.

Hemingway said it best:

“You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. It is the wait until that next day that is hard to get through.”

And I agree. That wait is hard. You WISH you could just keep chugging along and crank out all your ideas, but you’ve learned that if you drain yourself today, there’s nothing to get you out of bed tomorrow. It’s uncomfortable to try to be patient with your human limitations, to wait until you are restored and able to get back at it later.

That in-between time can be a dangerous place if you’re not careful. It’s easy to freak out and self-destruct. When art is your passion, when it’s the main thing you do to feel connected and alive, then it’s a drag to have to wait-out the necessary periods of rest. You might find yourself numbing the discomfort by eating a pint (or 2) of ice cream, or by drinking a bottle of wine, or by anxiously gnawing off your hand. Which, of course, makes it harder to start again tomorrow. It harms you and defeats the purpose of taking a break. And it leaves you feeling EXTRA uncomfortable because you’re hungover and feeling guilty for getting in the way of doing what you were so impatient to do in the first place.

I’ve had my share of foolish self-destructive moments, so surface pattern design has been a welcome addition to my list of non-work activities. It still lets me be creative and put my fascination with mundane objects to good use. It still lets me stretch my brain and marvel at the world around me. But it doesn’t drain me or require extreme precision. I can fix mistakes on the computer. I can afford to play around and try a million iterations of the same thing without feeling like I wasted hours of precious effort getting it just right. AND I can do it in my PJ’s on the couch!

So…Yay! I’m not saying my designs are going to show up in stores or on handbags any time soon, but hey, who knows? Now I at least know there’s a place for it. And there are so many things to turn into patterns! (And it’s oh-so-do-able thanks to modern things like iPads and Adobe!)

I’m only sorry that Hemingway didn’t have such a way to pass the time.

(and now I shall resist sharing EVERYTHING I’ve “patterned” so far, so that I don’t exhaust my supply of things to show you in the weeks to come…)

Which of my lemon/lime patterns do you like best? (The possibilities are ENDLESS!)

I’m on vacation in Arizona right now, but it’s Friday so here are some words for thought:

I’m a sucker for vibrant color, but I’m equally wooed by stark black and white. When I doodle in a crisp black-and-white style, I’m usually pretending I’m designing woodblock or linoleum prints (since I don’t have the capacity to do REAL printmaking right now). Or I fantasize about what kind of tattoo I’d design if I were to get one. I put on my “design” eyes and try to pull out and exaggerate the pattern-y elements of whatever I’m looking at. I approach this style of doodling much more slowly and carefully than when I use watercolors and ink. It requires me to be calm and focused. It’s for that very reason that I tend to draw this way when I am feeling anxious and scattered – the act of slowly rendering a design forces me to reign in my thoughts and find my center of balance.

That’s one of the many reasons why I think ALL of you should have a sketchbook, regardless of how “artistic” you think you are. There are a lot of reasons that I sketch that have nothing to do with my “job”. It’s often a tool for keeping sane. Sketch to calm down, sketch to focus, sketch to connect to a particular moment in time, sketch to let your mind wander…it’s more of a meditation and devotion practice than anything else.

Anyway, here are some doodles from my sketchbook that I did in one such moment of “angst”. It did the trick and detached me from the whirlpool of useless things I had been stressing about at the time.

I guess it’s the same idea as all those adult coloring books you see now.

See you when I get back from my trip! Perhaps I’ll have a few vacation sketches to show you.

I love collecting colorful, patterned, repetitive things in my sketchbook. I love looking at something and interpreting it by splashing color around in blips and blobs that bleed into each other and congeal into unpredictable new forms. First, I put on my HYPER-COLOR-VISION goggles and play around in a world where shapes and structure are lost and all I see are layers and layers of vibrant, deliciously varied hues. Then I put on my pattern-seekers (another pair of goggles. Sorry, they’re not available in stores) and superimpose some sort of organizing structure on top of the color blobs below. I love tying up my amorphous pools of color-impressions with sturdy (but still expressive) defining lines. It’s just like life, where we sort of wing-it through experiences happening in real time and then, retrospectively, give them a conceptual framework by defining what occurred and what it meant to us.

So, yeah. There’s a certain thrill to filling a page in my sketchbook with a bunch of colorful, repeating things. I love the process (and yeah, fine, I’ll admit it: it’s fun to see an end result, too). It’s all really just an excuse to play around with shapes and color and try to figure out why these things mean so much to me. It’s engaging and it makes me feel good.

Hence, this drawing. Sometimes, that’s all I’m doing: finding things that catch my eye — things that hook my imagination — and trying to understand them (and myself) through the process of interpretation/creation that’s called, apparently, “making art”. And all the while, I’m clinging to the hope that the end results will be things worth sharing with others so that I might have the opportunity to make them feel good, too. Because that’s the best.

Plaid and making art. They make me feel like me. What makes you feel like you?